dubpixel: words•music•pictures

It would appear that musicforhackers (soundscapes for compromising a remote host) has returned.

This was one of the first online radio stations I ever came across, streaming it virtually every night for months in 2001 when I first got my 512kbps ADSL connection from BTOpenworld.

A top-drawer collection of soothing ambient and IDM tracks, I was rather disappointed when this station seemed to disappear in 2002; I eventually discovered somafm.com’s Groove Salad but it was never exactly the same.

Thinking about the station quite a lot recently made me play “let’s test the URL” and lo, it is back.

Well, I will enjoy it whilst it is still around. I will definitely try and get this station to stream to my iPhone whilst on my journey to work.

Update: 15 June 2009
I don’t think streaming mfh will work at all on O2’s 3G service due to it being 256kbps. I hadn’t realised until looking at my bandwidth meter after posting that it was such a high-quality stream.

Music electronica, IDM, joy, musicforhackers, Radio, streaming

I haven’t seen the kora player in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester for a while, but he was around today so I managed to get a reasonable capture. This is one of my favourite “world” instruments; it’s got a resonant yet gentle harp-like sound. I think it complements the voice and vocal style of the folk singers in West Africa perfectly. Here’s a fine example of Kora folk by Saikou Jobarteh

160kbps/MP3
Kora player in Manchester Piccadilly 18th May 2009

Music African, busker, busking, kora, Manchester, Music, Piccadilly

I sent this letter out today to all residents of my estate. The inaccurately monikered “Waterloo Court”

WILL YOU GET A 60% PAYRISE THIS YEAR?
I THOUGHT NOT
SO DON’T LET CONTOUR HAVE ONE

You will have recently received a letter dated 11th May 2009 about the proposal by Gill Whitman to increase the service charge for your flat or maisonette on Brigadier Close or Burton Road.

The proposal is that residents in the Flat blocks (29 Burton Road and 9 Brigadier Close) will pay £81.86 per month which represents a 60% increase and the maisonette residents will pay £62.06 which is a 48% increase, this of course in addition to your rent or mortgage. This is simply scandalous especially in the increasingly financially uncertain time in which we live.

In my experience, in over 6 years living in Brigadier Close, Contour Homes have made no improvements to security despite repeated requests and violent robberies and car vandalism are a regular occurrence.

Contour Homes have always provided a poor service and have NEVER taken our concerns seriously

Contour Homes claim this money is required for “repairs”, “communal electricity” and “painting”, but these costs are simply outrageous.

Contour Homes have not delivered any of their promises, such as building a bicycle housing. They have however, repeatedly moaned and complained at us, their fee-paying residents.

I urge you to look at the budget and disagree with the proposal. In reality the actual lease fee has increased by only a marginal amount and the cost of the buildings insurance has actually decreased.

It is Contour’s fault they haven’t allocated enough funds over the years. Don’t let them take our hard earned money for no return.

You can address your complaint e-mail to the following people – Gill Whitman (gill.whitman@contourhousing.co.uk), Judith Winterbourne (judith.winterbourne@contourhousing.co.uk), Michelle Howard (michelle.howard@contourhousing.co.uk) and Mike Creamer (Michael.creamer@contourhousing.co.uk)

There is a meeting at the Contour Homes office in the Lowry Mall, Salford Quays on Tuesday 2nd June 2009 between 2 pm and 4 pm.

Please make every effort to attend or you will be out of pocket by as much as £365 per year.
DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN. DON’T LET CONTOUR GET AWAY WITH IT. WE SHOULD NOT PAY FOR THEIR MISTAKES

Resident
Brigadier Close

Daily Bollocks, Piffle Contour, housing, problem, ripoff

thinkbroadband :: The UK’s largest independent Broadband / ADSL comparison & review website. The 21st Century Network Plummet Everybody, do the plummet.

Web, logging 21CN, AAISP, ADSL2+, broken, future of broadband, plummeting, problems

Anyone who travels by bus on the Wilmslow Road corridor between Manchester Oxford Road and Fallowfield, the most popular student route, will have undoubtedly encountered this woman. I last saw her a couple of weeks ago.

She regularly boards Magic Buses and delivers a long and incoherent speech about an injustice which has occurred to her and her family. In addition to the speech, she hands out intricately designed, yet also illegible photocopies of her story. I don’t really understand what her story is, but she is clearly a desperately troubled individual.

I’ve heard that she occasionally sleeps rough, but she is always clean and well-groomed. She always has a shopping trolley with her; presumably this contains her possessions.

This is part of her story – Recorded at 2323 on the 27th November 2008

MP3/160kbps

Piffle bus, characters, iPhone, Manchester, recording

I’ve been meaning to post this recording up for a while, and now I’ve finally got time to trim and add it. This was recorded on the 13th February 2009 at 1404 outside the Manchester city centre Marks & Spencer store. The busker was standing next to the crossing on Cross Street. I use Bias iProRecorder in high quality mode, and I’ve added 3dB of gain and 4:1 compression in Sound Studio 3.57. 

I’ve never seen this busker since, but his sad and unusual style can only be interpreted as unique.

The Lonely Sax Busker of Manchester

MP3/192kbps

Music busker, iPhone, recording, sad, saxophone, street, tuneless, wanderings

Logging into the router remotely, I currently notice the following – Currently syncing 12659 kbps / 1057 kbps

tone 448-479: 24 44 44 43 44 43 34 44 44 44 44 44 34 44 44 43
tone 480-511: 44 34 44 33 33 44 43 43 33 33 43 42 32 22 22 22

Compare this to the result on the 18th February when the P660H-D1 was syncing at > 15000

tone 448-479: 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 44 45 55 54 44
tone 480-511: 44 45 44 44 45 45 54 45 44 55 45 44 44 34 44 54

There has been a definite fall-off in HF response.

Web ADSL, HF, response

Having the Zyxel P660H-D1 allows you access to the bits per tone values on the ADSL connection. This is from either the web interface – after logging in, click Maintenance > Diagnostic and click the DSL Line tab and click either the DSL Line Status or Capture All Logs button or telnet. The telnet command is wan adsl linedata near for downstream and wan adsl linedata far for upstream.

It is possible, I suppose to plot the bits per tone in Excel, but this would be fairly laborious. There are supposedly programs out there that will do the trick. After plugging my IBM T23 Thinkpad into a spare port on the Zyxel, this being a “Windows only” kind of area, I set about downloading stuff.

RouterStats 4.9 and RouterStats Lite did nothing for me. RouterStats needs configuring and I haven’t really got time at the moment. RouterStats Lite has inbuilt support for the P660H-D1, but I couldn’t make it work. It seems not to be logging in correctly. RouterStats seems mainly geared towards the Netgear DG834 (and DM111-P) which I’m not using at the moment.

Next on the list was Zyxmon 0.62b. Aimed at older, Prestige model gear this seemed like one rough app, but surprisingly after feeding it with the IP address an d password of the router, it yielded a bits per tone plot.

At 2300, I retrained the DSL connection and plotted with the following stats
Mode: ADSL2+ Speed: 11705/1029
Noise margin upstream: 4 dB Noise margin downstream 11 dB
attenuation upstream: 14 dB attenuation downstream 27 dB

bits per tone plot for 0161 4343***

There are considerable notches around tones 200, 238, 270 and 300. Serious concerns around 320 – 352.

Edit:

After writing this last night, I recalled an article I’d read in Radio User some months ago about AM radio stations interfering with ADSL frequencies and thinking about the “notches” above and whether they are stations or not. In my flat I certainly get massive amounts of interference which manifests as a very loud buzzing on certain frequencies. 1449 and 1512 being particularly strong in a rough North / South orientation of the receiver.

Here in Manchester, AM radio signals are fairly strong, so lets dig a bit deeper.

Cracking open Excel, and mapping frequencies to the tones

211 would be BBC 5 Live on 909 kHz
253 would be Talk Radio on 1089 kHz
267 would be Magic 1152
282 would be Absolute (previously Virgin 1215 kHz)
338 would be Gold on 1458 kHz

There is also the massive Euro power house station on 1440 kHz (Tone 334)

1458 is a massively strong station, so this may be an explanation for the huge dips around tones 320 – 352

Web, logging 21CN, AAISP, ADSL2+, bits per tone, BT, line, problem

Incredible as it may seem, I’m still seeing this regularly in Manchester

Piffle access, internet, viral, Web, wifi

P-660H-D1

SAR Driver Counters Display:
inPkts = 0×00009448, inDiscards = 0×00000000
outPkts = 0×00008395, outDiscards = 0×00000000
inF4Pkts = 0×00000000, outF4Pkts = 0×00000000
inF5Pkts = 0×00000000, outF5Pkts = 0×00000000
openChan = 0×00000004, closeChan = 0×00000002
txRate(Bps) = 10, rxRate(Bps) = 32

DSL Line Status:
noise margin upstream: 12 db
output power downstream: 21 db
attenuation upstream: 14 db
tone 0- 31: 00 00 00 06 89 ab bb dc cd dd dd dd dd db ba 90
noise margin downstream: 10 db
output power upstream: 12 db
attenuation downstream: 27 db
tone 0- 31: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 32- 63: 00 45 56 77 89 99 bb bc cc dd dd dd dd dd dd dd
tone 64- 95: dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd dd
tone 96-127: dd dc cc cc cc cc dc dc cc cc cc cc c2 cc cc cc
tone 128-159: cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cb cc cc cc
tone 160-191: cb bc bc cb bb bb bb bb bb bb bb bb bb bb bb bb
tone 192-223: bb bb bb bb bb bb bb bb ab 95 9b bb bb aa aa aa
tone 224-255: aa aa aa aa aa aa ba ba aa a9 9a aa aa aa 88 ab
tone 256-287: 9b bb bb bb bb b7 ab bb bb bb bb bb ba 7a bb bb
tone 288-319: bb bb aa ba aa aa aa aa aa aa aa 99 95 9a a9 99
tone 320-351: 99 99 99 99 99 99 88 77 64 03 57 77 88 88 88 88
tone 352-383: 88 88 88 87 88 88 78 88 88 77 77 77 77 77 77 77
tone 384-415: 77 77 77 77 76 55 56 66 66 67 77 77 66 66 66 66
tone 416-447: 65 66 66 66 55 66 66 66 55 56 66 65 55 56 56 55
tone 448-479: 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 44 45 55 54 44
tone 480-511: 44 45 44 44 45 45 54 45 44 55 45 44 44 34 44 54

DHCP: Server
IP Pool Starting Address: 81.2.*.*
Pool Size: 13

ZyNOS Firmware Version: V3.40(AGD.2) | 04/26/2006

WAN Information:
DSL Mode: ADSL2+ Mode
IP Address: 81.2.*.*
IP Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.255
Default Gateway: AAISP
VPI/VCI: 0/38

LAN Information:
IP Address: 81.2.*.*
IP Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.240

This morning around 7am syncing Down at 12200 but Up at 1032
Now at 11am syncing Down at 15226 / Up at 834
Makes no difference as BRAS is set at 10000 anyway.
Noise margins are nowhere near 6dB. Looks like BT have set at 10dB

Piffle adsl2+ aaisp problems zyxel poor

This is the first time in nearly four years I have ever known the Open University site to be unavailable. Service was restored as far as I can tell, around 9am on 14th Feb

Open University site

Web down, error, OU, site, unavailable

Connecting to AAISP (BT21CN ADSL2+) using Netgear DM111P

Yesterday 07:28:42 Yesterday 07:28:42 0161 434 **** BT Test xDSL Status Check:Pass Standalone sub test passed successfully.Pass OK. Circuit In Sync
BRAS=15000Kb/s FTR=6502Kb/s MSR=8128Kb/s ServOpt=1 I/L=A Up Sync=1096Kb/s LoopLoss=14dB SNR=7.5dB ErrSec=0 HECErr=0 Cells=0
Down Sync=17820Kb/s LoopLoss=28.5dB SNR=6.1dB ErrSec=0 HECErr=N/A Cells=0 Done mcpmp@a

Yesterday 07:28:45 Yesterday 07:28:45 0161 434 **** BT Test xDSL Copper Test:Inconclusive Line Test OK. Line loss is outside appropriate limits.Inconclusive Line Test OK. Line loss is outside appropriate limits. DS11:Line Test OK.Line loss is outside appropriate limits.

Connecting to AAISP (BT21CN ADSL2+) using Zyxel P-660H-D1 with AAISP config revision 3102:3103

Today 10:54:21 Today 10:54:21 0161 434 **** BT Test xDSL Status Check:Pass Standalone sub test passed successfully.Pass OK. Circuit In Sync
BRAS=10000Kb/s FTR=6502Kb/s MSR=8128Kb/s ServOpt=1 I/L=A Up Sync=852Kb/s LoopLoss=14.2dB SNR=9.4dB ErrSec=0 HECErr=0 Cells=0
Down Sync=12572Kb/s LoopLoss=26.5dB SNR=15dB ErrSec=0 HECErr=N/A Cells=0 Done mcpmp@a

Today 10:54:22 Today 10:54:22 0161 434 **** BT Test xDSL Copper Test:Inconclusive Line Test OK. Line loss is outside appropriate limits.Inconclusive Line Test OK. Line loss is outside appropriate limits. DS11:Line Test OK.Line loss is outside appropriate limits.

BRAS has dropped from 15000 to 10000
Upstream LoopLoss has risen 0.2dB (negligible) – SNR margin risen 1.9dB – Sync dropped 1096Kb/s to 852Kb/s
Downstream LoopLoss has dropped 2dB – SNR margin risen 8.9dB – Sync dropped 17820Kb/s to 12572Kb/s

Piffle 21CN, AAISP, ADSL, ADSL2+, BT, observations

Recorded at the Radio Theatre this evening

Morrissey Live Set

MP3 / 128kbps

Music, Radio dab rip, live, Morrissey, Radio, radio2

BBC Radio 2 this evening. Hilariously witty, well worth a listen.

Morrissey interview – Radio 2 11 February 2009

MP3 / 128kbps

Radio dab rip, interview, Morrissey, Radio, radio2

WiFiFoFum Log 10 February 2009

This is the KML file from the post below

Maps, Web KML, logging, mapping, wifi, WiFiFoFum

Music, Web Apple, electronic, iTMS, iTunes, mix, Music

A problem with Wordpress when hosted on Brinkster is that the following functions produce an error when uploading files to the media library

“Unable to move to C:\sites\username\…[..]”

I have found that this, and similar permission (access denied) errors when using the automated upgrade features for widgets and indeed wordpress itself.

There are a number of solutions to this problem on Wordpress forums and other Wordpress based logs, but there doesn’t appear to be any information specific to Brinkster hosted instances of WordPress.

The problem can be solved by logging into the Brinkster Control Panel and using the file manager to amend the permissions.

By default there are two users BRINKSTER\Username and BRINKSTER\IUSR_Username. BRINKSTER\Username will have Read\Write permissions on every folder, but IUSR_Username will be Read only. If IUSR_Username is write enabled this will allow WordPress functions to write.

To allow uploads set Read\Write on wp-content/uploads

To allow widgets set Read\Write on wp-content

To allow all functions set Read\Write on the entire wordpress folder e.g. \username\webroot\wordpress

I have some reservations about possible security implications on doing this, but currently this enables all functions on WordPress without any special help from Brinkster support – It’s not like they’re about to turn off php safe mode now, is it?

Piffle, Web Brinkster, permissions, security, wordpress

Was it really only just less 5 years ago that I tragically found myself loading a hefty Thinkpad T23, Orinoco B card and antenna into a rucksack and walking around the place with NetStumbler blipping away? Yes, it was.

Despite having had WiFiFoFum installed on my iPhone for some months for some reason until today, I had completely overlooked the Logging feature.

Catching a 42 bus from Manchester Piccadilly to Withington village ie. the route home from work, I switched it on and logged well over 800 APs along the way with, of course, full GPS data attached.

Sending the resultant KML file to myself via email, and then loading it into Google Earth I had an immediate map of utter geek pointlessness and joy.

To think I used to casually dream of being able to match my Stumbles to GPS data or to even log 100 or so APs in the same distance.

Warwalking / driving / bussing / flying a once-serious hobby which has now become a mere pocket trick in less than half a decade.

Download the KML file (zip)

Piffle, Radio, Web geek, GPS, iPhone, logging, sad, wardriving, wifi, WiFiFoFum

Spent the last couple of hours going through a very tedious process of elimination to discover why the sidebar displays incorrectly (pushed to the bottom right) in the inove 1.2.3 theme in IE6.

The original suggestion was to clean up the code, so I cleaned all the old posts (and found some dodgy markup) but this is not the solution.

There is an option in the Current Theme Options to “show tags in posts”. This seems to be what pushes the sidebar out and down in IE6 as unselecting the option fixes the problem. Whilst not an ideal solution it is a simple one.

I have settled for the “Tag Cloud” widget to replace the function.

Edit: Post author can also be switched off and tags switched back on. Decided that post author was less relevant as all the posts are made by me.

Web themes, Web, wordpress

Articles from Microsoft Research and from Useit.com

Business knowledge design, improvement, productivity, work